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 Bristol, James Johnson [q. v.], afterwards bishop of Worcester, and Thomas Foley, afterwards second Baron Foley, who furnished him with the means to adopt the law as a profession instead of the church, for which, as the younger son of a poor Scottish peer, he had been intended (, Biographiana, ii. 577). His family was Jacobite, and the high ideas of the royal prerogative with which Murray was in after life identified were doubtless due to his early training. A remarkable talent for declamation evinced at school he improved at Oxford by assiduous study of the classical models, particularly the orations of Cicero, some of which he translated into English and back again into Latin. An extant fragment of one of his academic exercises, a declamation in praise of Demosthenes, attests the purity and elegance of his latinity, and an 'Outline of a Course of Legal Study' which he made for the heir to the dukedom of Portland about 1730 proves the width of his reading. In 1727 he graduated B.A., and began a lifelong rivalry with William Pitt, afterwards Earl of Chatham, by defeating him in the competition for the prize offered by the university for a Latin poem on the death of George I. He proceeded M.A. in 1730, and on 23 Nov. of the same year was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn, of which he was made' a bencher in 1743. Murray was initiated into the mysteries of special pleading and conveyancing by Thomas Denison, afterwards justice of the king's bench, and James Booth (d. 1778) [q. v.] He frequented a debating club where moot-points of law were discussed in solemn form, 'drank champagne with the wits,' and practised elocution and the airs and graces of the advocate in the seclusion of his chambers at 5 King's Bench Walk, with the aid of a looking-glass and his friend Alexander Pope. Bolingbroke, Warburton, and Hurd were also among his friends (, Anecdotes, ii. 388 ;, Reminiscences, 1824:, pp. 120 et seq. ; , Johnson, ed. Hill, ii. 37, 158).

Aided by his Scottish connection Murray got rapidly into practice, and argued before the House of Lords in the case of Paterson v. Graham on 12 March 1732-3. Other Scottish briefs followed ; he gained popularity by his eloquent speech before the House of Commons in support of the merchants' petition concerning the Spanish depredations (30 March 1737-8), and after Walpole's fall he was made king's counsel and solicitor-general to Lord Wilmington's government, 27 Nov. 1742, entering parliament as member for Boroughbridge, Yorkshire, which he continued to represent until his elevation to the bench (, Memoirs of Sir Robert Walpole, i. 580). He was continued in office on Pelham's accession to power, 25 Aug. 1743, and by his speeches against the disbandment of the Hanoverian mercenaries, 6 Dec. 1743, and in support of the Habeas Corpus Suspension Bill, introduced in view of the threatened Jacobite insurrection, 28 Feb. 1743-4, proved himself the ablest defender of the government in the House of Commons. In September 1743 he was presented with the freedom of Edinburgh, in recognition of his professional services to that city when threatened with disfranchisement for its behaviour in the affair of the Porteous riots (cf. Comm. Journ. xxii. 896;, Hist. Rev. Trans, of Europe, i. 463 ; , Hist. of Edinburgh, i. 123 ; , Walpole). The prosecution of the rebel lords occupied him during the summer of 1746 and spring of 1747, and so well did he play his part that Lovat claimed kinship with him, and complimented him on his speech. A free-trader before Adam Smith, Murray made Lord Hardwicke's bill for prohibiting the insurance of French ships the occasion of an indictment of the policy of commercial restrictions pursued by the country during the previous half-century (18 Dec. 1747). He was now the acknowledged leader of the house, and by his defence of the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), of the Bavarian subsidiary treaties, and of the Regency Bill (1750-1), rendered the government yeoman's service. To discredit him a musty story was raked up of his toasting the Pretender in old days at the house of a Jacobite mercer in Ludgate (see, 1705-1774, bishop of Worcester, and Add. MS. 33050, ff. 200-368). His denial of the charge was accepted by the cabinet (26 Feb. 1752-3), but the Duke of Bedford moving for papers on the subject in the House of Lords, the oath of secrecy was dispensed with, and the whole affair rediscussed, the motion being eventually negatived without a division. On more than one subsequent occasion Pitt in the House of Commons threw out dark hints of Jacobitism in high places, which were generally understood to refer to Murray, and the charge was revived by Churchill in the fourth book of his 'Ghost.' While this miserable business was pending Murray was engaged in vindicating, as far as learning and logic could vindicate, the rights of his country and the authority of the law of nations against the high-handed procedures of the king of Prussia, who had made the arrest by English cruisers of some Prussian merchant ships suspected of carry-